Sunday, April 28, 2024

The Road to Victory Is Paved With Stories

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

— Anthony Trollope, born in 1815


DISPATCHES FROM THE CULTURE WARS:  The Road to Victory Is Paved With Stories.


No One Buys Books Any More Elysian Press


This sounds really good: astrophysicist Katie Mack and curious person John Green collaborate on A Podcast About The Entire History Of The Universe.


Exposure to poor people reduces support for redistribution among the [Danish] rich.  Paper here.




This year, Sara and Justin Ilse finished building a floor for their home’s 230-square-foot entryway out of 65,507 pennies.” (WSJ)


AI is being integrated into social media — now.  Social media will change.


Articles of Note

Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books. What it reveals isn’t pretty... more »


New Books

Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »


Essays & Opinions

“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »


April 25, 2024

Articles of Note

Penelope Fitzgerald, long expected to produce works of genius, only began writing serious fiction at the age of 62. How come?... more »


New Books

Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »


Essays & Opinions

As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist... more »


April 24, 2024

Articles of Note

“A death by bureaucracy.” Why is the University of Oxford shuttering its Future of Humanity Institute?... more »


New Books

Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »


Essays & Opinions

In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »


April 23, 2024

Articles of Note

When did it become embarrassing to like classical music? When it became thought of as an elite art... more »


New Books

A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »


Essays & Opinions

Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »


April 22, 2024

Articles of Note

Leonard Cohen was in a dark place: He hated poetry, and folk music, the hippie scene. Then the Yom Kippur War broke out... more »


New Books

Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »


Essays & Opinions

Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »


April 19, 2024

Articles of Note

A homogeneous Harlem Renaissance? The period’s art depicts pool halls, jazz clubs, formal dinners, and social groups at odds with one another... more »


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A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »


Essays & Opinions

“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »


April 18, 2024

Articles of Note

We read the classics but ignore much of what readers once enjoyed: forgeries, pseudotranslations, and other ephemera from the dustbin of literary history... more »


New Books

For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »


Essays & Opinions

Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »


April 17, 2024

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“The Recluse of Amherst.” Emily Dickinson’s life, it turns out, was full of baking, corresponding, and humor... more »


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Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »


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How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »


April 16, 2024

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Making art in the streaming era: Wall Street cash buoyed the era of “prestige TV,” but then that money dried up... more »


New Books

AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »


Essays & Opinions

In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »


Saturday, April 27, 2024

Gangster turned investigative reporter launches his first wine

Miles Mehta  An undercover operative and an informant say they've been abandoned by Australia after helping fight organised crime

 

Gangster turned investigative reporter 

launches his first wine

Twelve months after his first vintage, this Victorian winemaker is selling a wine inspired by a cult label in Spain, Persian poetry, and the land of his ancestors.
Max AllenDrinks columnist
Mahmood Fazal’s earliest memory of wine is of watching uncles drinking cask red out of fancy cups at family functions in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs when he was a kid.
“They thought it was the height of elegance,” he says. “It was only some uncles, though, the ones who held sway. They remind me of stories of the shah in the 1700s being the only one allowed to drink. A guy on a gilded 

Fazal’s parents had moved to Australia in the late 1980s, fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Fazal was a “happy-go-lucky, suburban Aussie kid” at primary school, he says. Played cricket. Listened to Powderfinger. Flew under the radar. Until he was in year six, when September 11 happened, and the World Trade Centre towers came down, and suddenly everyone at school knew exactly who he was and where his family was from.
“Which is a very surreal thing, as a young kid, to have a new identity imposed on you,” Fazal says. “I thought of myself as an accepted member of the community. And suddenly, there was this distance. I began to spin out.”
The spinning out turned into violence, which spiralled out of control until, in year 10, Fazal’s father moved him to a private school, as a circuit breaker. It worked – for a time. An influential teacher introduced Fazal to art and literature and poetry and film: he would screen films by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and Iranian Abbas Kiarostami in class, seeding the idea that there are many ways of telling a story, and many different narratives.
Fazal stomping shiraz grapes, in preparation for making his first wine.  
Inspired, Fazal went to film school. But finding work was hard, so he drifted back to the people he’d hung out with in early high school. He got involved in gangs, joined an outlaw motorcycle club, and was swept up in a world of drugs and violence.
But he kept reading. And writing. Obsessively. And when he left the gang behind, he started contributing to Vice, writing about crime culture from an insider’s perspective. Which led, in 2020, to a Walkley award, and then a job as an investigative reporter for the ABC’s Four Corners. (His report on Australia’s crystal meth supply chain, “Meth Highway”, aired on Four Cornersthis week.)
His ongoing fascination with poetry – particularly the work of Persian polymath Omar Khayyam – also provided a counter to the memories of his fabulous uncles and their cask wine.
“It made me think about wine drinking in a mystical way,” he says. “I read about spiritual drunkenness or ecstasy in both the Christian and Sufi traditions. And how, in a Persian literary context, the spirit of drunkenness can be rediscovering a taste of what had been lost.”
Travelling in Spain a few years ago, Fazal also discovered the visceral pleasure of wine and its profound connection to place.
San Sebastián in Spain is where Fazal developed a taste for a particular style of wine. 
“I was in San Sebastián. I had €100 in my pocket and decided to spend it on what I hoped would be a memorable experience. So I ordered a Comando G Rumbo al Norte [a cult red made from a tiny old plot of mountain grenache vines near Madrid]. It was so dense it was like licking rocks. It was so vivid: I was walking through woodland covered in stones.”
Back in Australia, Fazal went looking for wines that provided a similar experience and discovered the red wines Josh Cooper was making from mature vineyards in central and western Victoria. Fazal had moved to the region and would see Cooper around, at places like Bar Merenda in Daylesford. So, he offered to help during vintage.
Bar Merenda in Daylesford, where Fazal met winemaker Josh Cooper. Penny Ryan
“For the first couple of years I was a cellar hand at Cobaw Ridge with Josh, Alan and Nelly Cooper. But then one evening we were a few bottles deep and Andy [Ainsworth, co-owner of Merenda], said he could get me a little tonne of shiraz grapes to play with if I wanted to make my own wine.”
And now, 12 months after his first vintage in 2023, and with help from Cooper, Ainsworth and another local wine identity, Jeremy Shiell, Mahmood Fazal has started selling that wine.
A glass of freshly poured Khun shiraz. 
The imagery on the label, the name of the wine – Kuhn, “blood” in Persian – and the quote from Sufi poet Rumi on the back label (“The wine is intoxicated with us, not we with it”) all play on Fazal’s background and passions. But for him, the most important word on the label is “shiraz” – rather than “syrah”, which is the French name for the grape that many of his winemaking contemporaries, chasing lighter, more ethereal styles, choose to use.
“When James Busby, the ‘godfather’ of Australian wine, brought cuttings of this vine into the country in the 1830s, he called it shiraz,” says Fazal. “He wrote about how the vines had originally been introduced to the northern Rhone Valley [in France] by soldiers returning from the Crusades, who told great stories about the wines they’d had in the mountains of Shiraz [in present-day Iran].”
Modern DNA testing has debunked this myth, showing that the variety – called syrah in the northern Rhone – in fact emerged in the French region and has no connection to Shiraz, the place.
“But I thought it would be fun to lean into Busby’s Orientalist myth-making,” says Fazal. “I love how in Australia we entwined the mythical heritage of Shiraz wines with a character that’s uniquely our own.”
2023 Mahmood Fazal “Kuhn” Shiraz [Western Victoria]
 
“I wanted to dial everything up with this wine,” says Fazal. “Tannin, concentration, the lot. So, I picked the grapes later than most people would, kept the wine on skins for longer, in barrel a bit longer. It’s the opposite of what’s the trend with shiraz these days.”
Despite his best efforts, Fazal couldn’t escape the underlying coolness of the vineyard site and the coolness of the 2023 vintage (neither would he want to, of course). Yes, his shiraz is a fabulously deep and dense shade of purple as you swirl it in the glass, and yes, there’s plenty of substance, of black-cherry liquorice flavours – and plenty of the long, tangy, “amped-up” tannins he was chasing. But there’s also an unmistakable taste of time and place in the wine, there, in its hints of – yes! – dried blood on dusty earth, and a faint echo of gum-leaf litter as the wine fades slowly on the tongue. $60
Fazal poured his wine publicly for the first time at a recent event at the Kelvin Club in Melbourne, where he was in conversation with creative consultant and fellow wine-and-film obsessive James Hewison. I thank both for permission to quote from that conversation here.

Need to know

  • Mahmood Fazal is dribbling his very limited production wine out through local central Victorian outlets such as Bar Merenda and top-end regional restaurants such as Brae, as well as at France-Soir Restaurant and retailer Diggin’ In The Cellars in Melbourne. In Sydney, the wine is available through DRNKS.
  • Contact him through Instagram @mahmoodfazaland find out more about his life outside wine at mahmoodfazal.com.au

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